Apple Desire

The Year In Desire: How Apple Mastered Desire

What changed?With Apple’s bling-covered fingers in so many pies — the iTunes store, tablets, phones, MP3 players, TVs, etc. — we sometimes forget that it started out as a simple computer company. And that it was a clueless computer company for many years. It was making beige boxes that were barely distinctive from cheaper Windows PCs, and, while it’s true that it was renowned for its easy-to-use interface design and “it just works” philosophy before the iPhone, Apple’s products were not unique enough to justify their premium price tag. Back then, Mac computers were a lot more expensive than the competition’s, so it’s a wonder the company survived as long as it did during those chicken-with-no-head days before Steve Jobs’ return.

Steve Jobs is what changed Apple — again. He recognized Apple’s strengths and unique ability to move quickly because it controlled the OS, the software and the hardware, and then took aim at the sluggish, bureaucracy-burdened competition. Where companies like Dell were forced into bottom-of-the-barrel competition with largely similar hardware and low margins, Apple made a computer into something you didn’t hide in the corner. That was the iMac, and, even if you hated it, you had to recognize it as a new dawn of computing devices as a statement, not just a collection of buttons and transistors.

With the huge success of the iMac — and the accompanying rash of transparent blue USB hubs — Apple then set about revolutionizing the MP3 player. The first-gen 2005 iPod looks like a brick next to a flash-based nano, but the relatively small, appealing and easy-to-use hard drive-based MP3 player with fast FireWire interface made CD MP3 players look dated and existing flash-based players seem anemic by comparison. The accompanying success of the iPod series and, later, a dual-platform iTunes, quickly propelled the company past Walmart as the world’s largest distributor of music. But that was all in the cards from the start.

Then Apple set its sights on the cell phone. It knew that the future of computing — and the profits — lay in truly mobile computing. If you look at other brands’ phones in the era when the iPhone was introduced, you can see that Apple’s vision was completely unique. The then-ubiquitous BlackBerry was a capable phone, but navigating the internet or anything other than typing on its mostly-keypad design was an awkward experience. The all-touchscreen iPhone, with its single home button, set the stage for truly intuitive computing — it made iPhone for Dummies redundant. I was horrified when my mother told me she wanted to get one because she’s one of those people who thinks all her email has been deleted when a window closes. The proof, for me, that the iPhone was a miracle of mobile computing wasn’t the 3D games on a tiny screen; it’s that my mom still hasn’t had any problems using it and has never called to say “I think I deleted the internet.”

By 2008, Apple’s strategy of “change the market and see how long it takes the competition to catch up” was working. It moved on to design and engineer what Nvidia head Jen-Hsun Huang later called the future of the laptop, saying, “You’ll have trouble finding one [laptop] that doesn’t look like the MacBook Air.” Those are pretty kind words from a guy whose products were nowhere to be found in the MacBook Air. The unibody Apple completely leapfrogged the slow, cheap-feeling netbook and created something that was highly portable but didn’t feel compromised. You didn’t yearn to use a netbook, but it was hard not to be pulled into the Apple desire aura when you first saw a MacBook Air. But Apple still had one nail left for the coffin of the netbook...

The iPad is a new enough product that it doesn’t take too much digging into the memory crates to remember what separated it from the competition: It had none. Microsoft and hardware makers had so far failed to gain any sort of noticeable following with tablet PCs, those now-defunct things that were basically Windows laptop screens with a stylus. Apple knew that you don’t interact with a device meant for information consumption with an operating system like OS X or Windows. The iPhone’s iOS made much more sense for tablets, and Apple adapted it for the iPad. As for its desirability — well, that’s a thing of legend. By October 2012, Tim Cook said that Apple had sold 100 million iPads, and, that quarter, Apple sold more iPads than all PCs sold in the same timeframe. Cook unveiled the iPad mini, which isn’t a revolutionary design, since it was brought in to fill out Apple’s position in the tablet market. Cheaper tablets may exist, but it’s Apple’s iPad that people want. The iPad mini sold out in days.

Now that the dust has settled from these consecutive hits, Apple’s magical desire aura has given the company so much momentum that it could join up with Yoko Ono for Plastic Ono Band 2.0, and people would probably sing along with their squelching. But Jobs left the company with enough solid staffing to endure his absence for years to come, so I don’t think it will come to that. Motivated by an urge to innovate, the company will still be firing on all cylinders for years to come. Tim Cook has already proven his mettle with some tough, but correct, decisions. The question is: How long can Apple play both David and Goliath?